noise: scourge of modernity

"The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire -- we hold history's record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums...."
(A cranky Aldous Huxley, 1944)

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"Toward making a 'dead room' in the living room: patented acoustic building materials isolate the subject from city noise. Advertisement for Herringbone Rigid Metal Lath acoustic insulator, Architectural Forum, July 1923." (Caroline A. Jones, Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art)

hollowed-out galaxies inhabiting your eyes

I'd like to tell you about Swan Lake's new song, 'A Hand At Dusk'. It's metaphysical, it's mystical, it's going to save us all in slow movements from the very thing that kills us all in slow movements.

I first encountered this song when I played their new album, Enemy Mine, on my cd player. It's at the back of the album, so it was small time until I chanced upon it. The group always committed to at least one extra release post-Beast Moans, and what a good thing that is, because otherwise this song would not have been spawned from the dark, swampy millpond that is the transcendent creative triad of Dan Bejar, Carey Mercer and Spencer Krug. Beast Moans was so named, by the way, after Krug decided it sounded as if "a boar dying in a tar pit". What a slow and painful way to go.

So, anyway, back to the song. One of the most striking aspects of this song is that it doesn't feel as long as it 'actually' is (in terms of chronos) - go listen to it. Then come back and I'll reveal a secret.

...


...


...


It's over six minutes long! You'd never guess. That's because somehow the cosmos themselves turn slower as this song lapses (as in kairos). It's probably because they are listening to that haunting guitar (?) feedback in the background that sounds like angels colliding with doves high up in the grey clouds. Or that gradual, assured piano line that is as much about yawning gulfs between notes as it is about the chords actually struck. Pianos have these little thingscalled hammers and I like to imagine flecks of gold coming off the flint of the steel strings every time one of these notes hammer it, ever so softly, breaking it down until the floor is all covered with little glinting particles just like those you get in the bottle when you come back from Sovereign Hill.

"The Emperor Of Time Has Been Stationed
Where The Pavement Melts Into All Forms Of Light"

This line is this song's epigrammatic manifesto. 'A Hand At Dusk' chases this leviathan and lo and behold snatches him at the shore of the crashing sea. That means the ocean. Oceans are particularly interesting bodies of water because their magnitude is incomprehensible, the collected sound they make literally too great for human ears, but if we sit at the shore they can be at least apprehended.

If we gaze upon this ocean, we see that "There's A Hand At Dusk, In The Wake, In The Water, It's Mine (Mine?), Can You Take The Palm Of It?" This question is mostly rhetorical because you're not the one doing the action here, this song is the one working you over. But grab the hand, and travel along space and time, "Mountains And Peaks", "Books Of Maps",

"Can You Believe That We Will All Get Old?"

Think about that whilst the song builds to its middle section peak, before the sea comes crashing down with the realisation that, yes, we will, but at least we can still hold onto one another, and at least we still look good. And at least we can live and die over and over again all in the space of just six slow minutes.

VICTORY!

(By Julie Hill)

the post-apocalyptic uses of compact diskettes

(From A Steampunk's Guide to the Apocalypse)

BEN LEE DOES NOT HEART POP

Ben Lee - I Love Pop Music


I love pop music, more and more every day this year in fact. 2009 is my very own Year of Pop. But it's not going to be trumpeted by this utter douchebag's apparent 'tribute' to that genre, nay MODERN PHENOMENON, that we call pop. Because there are about a million reasons why Ben Lee has it all wrong, why he neither understands nor loves pop music:

Pop, despite what some might think, is not so fucking obvious as this song. This song thinks it can perfunctorily summarise the entire genre whilst simultaneously operating in it's register. Observe:

I love pop music, this is how we do it
It’s politics you can romance to
I love pop music, sprinkle sugar through it,
Philosophy that you can dance to

(Started listening to the actual song to transcribe those lyrics, found an almost primal reflex within myself to instantly hit 'STOP' and was thankfully saved having to live out any more than the first line again by the joy that is Metro Lyrics)

THIS IS NOT HOW WE DO IT (this, however, is) - what the fuck does dude think he is doing reducing the utter complexity that is pop to this pithy little couplet? I can imagine Ben sitting there in his studio, writing that one down - I dunno, maybe it came to him in an epiphany whilst 'jamming' - and thinking to himself how supasmart he is, "Well done Ben," he says to himself (classic narcissist, we all remember), "you've cracked the code!!!"

Like, fuck, no way, pop music can hold in tension seemingly contradictory positions/affects?! Wow. Now I know that that's something I've banged on about here, but where Ben makes the obvious fuck up is that he thinks it's that fucking simple. That that's all there is to it. Tellingly, for him its a zero sum game; his lyric posits a kind of mutually exclusive equation - it's political and after that you can romance to it, as if there was no politics to the romancing itself, or no romancing to the politics, etc etc. But that's not even the half of it.

Coz like I said, the worst part is that he thinks he can get away with revelation of pop within pop - just not possible dude. The whole reason pop can work in paradox is because it is entirely surface but with a second side, like a surface that conceals another surface that is its mirror. I have no idea if that makes sense, but think of like looking down from a still boat at the sea, then looking up from under the water at that same spot. Kind of like that. So it's meanings are simultaneously clear and yet always completely hidden. It's like it's depth works through its shallowness, so some throwaway lyric about Kissing A Girl is politicised just as it is seemingly only romantic. But Katy Perry certainly didn't sing - "This is a song about ambivalent sexuality / Even though I sound like I'm kind of tolerant and/or experimental re lesbianism / I'm actually just a hetero scab / That cares more about turning on my boyfriend". NO ONE SINGS WHAT THEY'RE SINGING ABOUT IN POP. That's just not its mode of self-reference. This kind of shit actually nullifies its very force!!!

And where it really becomes clear (haha, like anything I write here ever is) that he has fucked things up is his fucking hubris in just casually throwing in completely fucking bare sentences like

"Our leaders have not committed to a plan of action on renewable energy
The food crisis is currently affecting a hundred million people world wide"

If pop is ever going to have political import or effect it's certainly not going to be through bashing its listeners over the head with such loaded and yet entirely boring (written like they are as gross little sound bites from some lazy left-wing politician's speech) statements as this. Because that's the entire fucking point of pop - sure it matters, its powerful and political - but it doesn't solve global hunger/warming/war, there is no material conditions to pop, it cannot propel or change these conditions, in fact it never claimed that it could or should. So why the fuck is Ben Lee singing about this stuff in a fucking pop song? And why so fucking obvious?

When it comes down to it, dude has completely and stupidly confused the politics of pop with Politics proper, and the artifice of pop with the manifestly explicit, the simple.

Listening to this song is to know what it feels like to play a song as a complete and utter document of itself - there is no depth, nothing but what it says and plays, and no conception of its own stupidity. Max aptly compared it to 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)' - and he is completely right. Both songs are so far stuck up their own completely megolomaniacal and solipsistic philosophising that they can't ever provide even a scrap of insight, all the more because they think they are peeling back the layers of the whole fucking world.

Plus you know you're fucked if Missy Higgins is on backing vox.

jedi dreams of being able

Final Fantasy, Meredith Music Festival, 13th December 2008

"[Antony Hegarty has] established himself as a purveyor of both constructed identity and heart-on-sleeve sincerity" (Joel Elliot on cokemachineglow)

The problem we face when it comes to Owen Pallett (for Final Fantasy live is just himself, a violin, keyboard, loop pedals and four or five amps to play said loops set up with the precision of roman columns behind him) is one of relating emotion through conceit and artifice. For our bleeding hearts want him to wear his own on his sleeve, to bare all rather than wrap it up. But the nature of his stage setup means that his performance is one of extreme concentration, Pallett plays with the reserve and detachment of a surgeon almost, as the orchestration of various song phrases and instruments (all evoked from just voice, violin, keyboard, itself quite amazing as he creates a miniature orchestra) overtakes any considerations of expression. The most wrenching manifestation of this was when he stopped on a pin, mid-song, to complain to the technicians about the audio onstage, in the middle of some beautiful, grand composition as if he'd just paused a video game.

But really this is just like his recordings - for all the sense in which Final Fantasy is adherent to that expectation us indie fans have for unmediated emotional sensitivity (come on, he plays the violin - meaningfulness guaranteed with string instruments) there is just as much in which this is wrapped up in fables and fallacies of Dungeons & Dragons (he said that He Poos Clouds was originally intended as "an eight-song cycle about the eight schools of magic in Dungeons & Dragons"), fictional characters (impotent businessmen), obscure metaphors (the world's tallest tower as a monument to the dead) and history-crossing scenes (his EP Spectrum, 14th Century contains the line "I've a temper as shiny as any bling!").

And in this obscurantism, Pallett is a true romantic, at least in the way I think of romanticism. Because far from the popular idea of romantics as conveyers of direct, inherently human feeling, they were actually elevators - always looking for the nicest conceit to raise the emotionaly mundane to the transcendent, even in love it almost becomes an intellectual game.

And sitting there watching this set, I came to realise just how much this tendency informs Pallett's entire approach. It's like how his voice is so often put through an intercom mic, and sung at a kind of half-pace so that it lags behind the music, never quite fulfilling the sense of feeling that it hints at. And that way he covered Joanna Newsom's Peach, Plum, Pear - whereas Newsom made this maybe the only song where she pulls back the layers and layers of metaphor and simile for unbridled emotional expression (screaming 'I am blue' in a thousand Joannas), Pallett as it were re-Newsomifies it, singing it in an almost throwaway manner that once more covers up its emotion.

And it is in all this that Final Fantasy asks us to confront an uneasy experience, but one that I think is worthwhile: something akin to the denial of our desire just as it is being fulfilled perfectly.

more human than human

So this whole auto-tune thing is definitly something close to the heart of the (con)temporary. It's been a tendency in pop music somewhere since the eighties I'd say, the robotisation of the 'natural human voice'. But that decade's robopop was wilfully inhuman, a kind of excess of synthesisation that evidenced more just a fascination with the technology rather than expressing emotional truth, so much so that artists like Tubeway Army and Gary Numan found that technologisation of the voice and music could stand for the same social process, one of social alienation:

Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars

Whereas nineties and millenial pop was focused more thoroughly on 'perfecting' the human voice, the use of digital and manual production technologies to make the voice sound as natural as possible, catch Avril Lavigne for this. This tendency reached its exhaustion point in Cher's Believe, the first track to use Auto-Tune software as a deliberate effect rather than attempt to 'naturalise' the voice - that distinctive pitch mangling on her vocals became a highly used effect ever since.

Nowadays, it's kind of like something of a mixture of these two tendencies, an attempt to simultaneously shoot for nature and effect, that energises a lot of pop music. R&B artists like Chris Brown (see Forever) use pitch correction to excellent effect, accentuating their soulful/soulless music by stretching out modulations, or deliberately over-correcting 'hey' and 'oh' backing vocals. There is a obviousness to this practice that means they are not concerned with 'covering up' their use of corrective software, but rather become virtuouso performers of technology. The human voice is found wanting, or more a base material to be input into a system with far greater fidelity and emotional potential. Not that this hasn't been the very axiom of pop since its conception; the human voice is always object as much as subject. Anyway, in this domain, the idea is that the technologised voice is perfect, not a substitute to 'complete' the human voice, but rather in and of itself beautiful, expressive, its own apex. That we have reached this juncture in our historical ways of listening is quite interesting.

The exhaustion point of this new tendency, I think, would have to be Kanye West's Love Lockdown. This is what marathonpacks calls the "grotesque performance of prolix, technologized amateurism", but I'd re-think that first (and def last) term. It's not so much grotesque as complete - the handing over of emotion to technology. It's as if West cannot deal with the messy grief that consumes him on 808s and Heartbreak, so he relegates (or elevates) this job to technology. Machines that can cry for us.

depth that was never there [pop jamz 08]

Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened

From the moment that stick hits the snare skin, Nothing Ever Happened doesn’t let up. The thing I love about this song is that there is just no fucking around whatsoever, lockstep bass and drum lines ensure it is 100% propulsion and the lyrics are spare, repetitive and to the point – exemplifying most of (the best parts of) the work on Microcastle. But this selfsame tendency is collapsed with noodling at the back end of the song, but it somehow doesn’t feel like noodling whatsoever! What a fucking awesome concept! I’ll just put this here again to point the way forward for all music – indie, pop, hip hop, polka, whatever:

"I wanna make songs that, like, a wider, younger audience can get behind. You know? A kid who just now is getting over My Chemical Romance or something. Or like, just now thinking, like, 'I wanna hear something a little more experimental.'" (Bradford Cox)

But not too experimental!

number one champion sound [pop jamz 08]

Estelle feat. Kanye West - American Boy

Well the first thing you need to know about this song is that it’s an absolute breeze. Apart from that metallic grill synth push you hear in the chorus – perfectly embedded nonetheless, and gradually less grating – everything else in this song just flows along real nice and smooth. Of course there’s some interesting minimalist sections that keep the song interesting, like from when “He said...” rolls off Estelle’s tongue. But the guitars are almost loungey, there’s a bunch of ‘ooo’s in the background and that drum, dude it’s just a simple rock beat! And girl’s voice, real nice. Got a tiny few British pebbles in it to make its purr unique enough.

But the funniest thing is when I first heard this song – and I still think this most of the time – I thought it was actually a Kanye West song! Because no matter how nice she is, Estelle just doesn’t have the presence to fill out a song as great as this, and her main event somehow seems to take backseat to the ‘feat.’ dude and the flawless production. I guess that’s because the ‘feat.’ dude is, yeah, Kanye, and he just saunters into this whole thing all cocksure and smooth as, dripping money and self-props, even as he (as always) finds it necessary to explain himself to his detractors. But not even Ye’s sometimes suffocating self-awareness could possibly overtake this track. The whole thing just slots in behind itself, taking its own ride on a transborder flirt in such a slick and catchy way that it really does summon pop’s duality of transience and memorialisation.

on some real shit [pop jamz 08]

T.I. – Dead and Gone / Whatever You Like

I feel like I am just way underqualified to talk about r’n’b/hip hop, let alone pop rap, but damn T.I. just makes such great tunes! It’s not just in the excellent choice of Timberlake for emoting the chorus and the totally-obvious-yet-still-sweet digi-clap/HEY! moment and all the sophisto production and shit, but also it’s his really great flow. It’s just so palatable, the way it’s so structured but still flows across lines but then with tiny little punches. Like the dis/enjambment in this little bridge...

No more stress

Now I’m straight

Now I get it,

Now I take

Time to think

Before I make

Mistakes

Just for my family’s sake

... Is just great. It inputs some kind of error/flow tension into his songs that’s well appealing. And the way this flow works on Whatever You Like is funny – it’s like this metronomic, tennis-court rhyming sways back and forth between seemingly discrete lines until sex becomes money becomes possessions all wet and slippery until they all dissolve into this pop fantasy of nothing in particular or, y’know, whatever you like.